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VOTE NOW Westeros 100 Best Books VOTE NOW


Wastrel

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I thought it was awesome, Wastrel, and my teasing was simply light-hearted. Seriously.

I used to run a blog too, so I found it doubly impressive. Put that link back in your sig, or *I* will put it in *MY* sig!

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OK.

I've created two lists, because I've taken the 21st century (2001 and later) out of the main list. There is naturally a recency bias, with contemporary works inevitably getting more attention; what's more, I'm not sure that it's as easy to judge quality after so little time, with many of the 21st century works not even complete yet. So, I've created a list of 101 books of the 20th century (well, there's four from before 1900, actually), and a list of 10 books of the next decade. For each list, I've also given ten additional works that didn't quite make it in.

I'm don't want to waffle much here, but I should also remind that this is a popular vote, and that it should't be considered a 'greatest novels' list - more a 'greatest list' of novels: a recommendations list by a large group to an unknown genre reader, which aims to find some thing to please everyone, rather than to find the thing that will most please anyone.

The Main List:

The Affirmation – Christopher Priest

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

The Anubis Gates – Tim Powers

The Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Black Company – Glen Cooke

Blindness – Jose Saramago

The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Cat's Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

Childhood's End – Arthur C. Clarke

China Mountain Zhang – Maureen McHugh

The Chronicles of Amber – Roger Zelazny

The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) – Stephen Donaldson

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

The H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus – H.P. Lovecraft

The Dark Tower – Stephen King

Discworld – Terry Pratchett

The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick

Doomsday Book – Connie Willis

Downbelow Station – C.J. Cherryh

Dracula – Bram Stoker

Dune – Frank Herbert

The Dying Earth – Jack Vance

The Dying of the Light – George R.R. Martin

The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le Guin

The Empire Trilogy – Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts

Ender's Quartet – Orson Scott Card

The Farseer Trilogy – Robin Hobb

The Fencer Trilogy – K.J. Parker

Fevre Dream – George R.R. Martin

Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges

The Forever War – Joe Haldeman

The Foundation Trilogy – Isaac Asimov

The Gap Series – Stephen Donaldson

Good Omens – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

The Gormenghast Trilogy – Mervyn Peake

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago

A Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood

The Harry Potter Series – J.K. Rowling

Hellblazer – Garth Ennis

His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts – Douglas Adams

The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien

Hyperion – Dan Simmons

I Am Legend – Richard Matheson

The Illiad - Homer

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

The Iron Dragon's Daughter – Michael Swanwick

The Last Unicorn – Peter S. Beagle

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin

The Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay

Little, Big – John Crowley

The Liveship Traders – Robin Hobb

Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny

The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

Lucifer's Hammer – David Niven and Jerry Pournelle

The Lyonesse Trilogy– Jack Vance

The Glass Bead Game – Hermann Hesse

The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn – Tad Williams

Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein

Le Morte D'Arthur – Thomas Mallory

Mythago Wood – Robert Holdstock

Neuromancer – William Gibson

The Night’s Dawn Trilogy – Peter F. Hamilton

Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

Odyssey - Homer

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Only Forward – Michael Marshall Smith

Otherland – Tad Williams

Permutation City – Greg Egan

Planet of Adventure – Jack Vance

The Prestige – Christopher Priest

Replay – Ken Grimwood

The Riddle-Master Trilogy – Patricia A. McKillip

Sandman – Neil Gaiman

The Sarantine Mosaic – Guy Gavriel Kay

Shardik – Richard Adams

The Silmarillion – J.R.R. Tolkien

Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

Solaris – Stanislaw Lem

The Soldier Trilogy (Soldier of the Mist, Soldier of Arete, and Soldier of Sidon)– Gene Wolfe

A Song of Ice and Fire – George R.R. Martin

The Stand – Stephen King

The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester

Starship Troopers – Robert A. Heinlein

Tigana – Guy Gavriel Kay

The Tooth Fairy – Graham Joyce

Transmetropolitan – Warren Ellis

Use of Weapons – Iain M. Banks

The Warlord Trilogy – Bernard Cornwell

Watchmen – Alan Moore

Watership Down – Richard Adams

We – Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Wheel of Time – Robert Jordan

Ten additional works also mentioned: Salem’s Lot (Stephen King), Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis), The Once and Future King (T.H. White), The Elric Series (Michael Moorcock), A Fire Upon The Deep (Vernor Vinge), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury), The Vorkosigan Saga (Lois McMaster Bujold), The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), and The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri).

Ten Works from the 21st Century:

Acts of Caine – Matthew Stover

Black Man – Richard Morgan

The First Law Trilogy – Joe Abercrombie

The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch

The Long Price Quartet – Daniel Abraham

The Malazan Book of the Fallen – Steven Erikson

The Orphan’s Tales – Cathrynne M. Valente

Prince of Nothing – R. Scott Bakker

The Scar – China Mièville

Stories of Your Life and Others – Ted Chiang

Also mentioned: The Road (Cormac McCarthy), American Gods (Neil Gaiman), City of Saints and Madmen (Jeff Vandermeer), Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell), Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke), The Wizard Knight (Gene Wolfe), Chasm City (Alastair Reynolds), Anathem (Neal Stephenson).

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Thank you for the list, Wastrel !

I kinda expected to find more books that I haven't read in it, but it should still be a valuable guideline for a significant amount of time. :)

Now I must say I'm curious (as everybody will be I guess) as to how the counting went, what was the minimal amount of points to get on the list ?

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Good work Wastrel. Are you going to publish the list sorted by number of votes as well?

I think it's better not to. This was never built to be a poll to produce a ranked list, and if I'd set out to do that, I'd probably have chosen a different system; but if I present the rankings, people will read it as a ranked list, which I think would be inappropriate. [in particular, I'd rather not say which books came last]

[its not perfectly straightfoward to rank the books, in any case - for instance, The Left Hand of Darkness got fewer votes than Downbelow Station, but Le Guin got a LOT more votes than Cherryh overall. And while in theory you could vote for multiple books by the same author, in practice there's always a tendency in these polls toward wanting to nominate more authors and just pick one per author - so if people had been banned from voting for the Dispossessed for some reason, Left Hand would probably have beaten Downbelow Station.]

That said, I don't mind answering specific position questions (ie 'X or Y - who did better?') People may be interested to know that Tolkien narrowly but safely beat Martin, but that ASOAIF was the top book, with Tolkien's vote split. There was then a large gap to Wolfe and Bakker, and then another gap to Herbert, Mieville, Kay, Simmons, and Orwell, with Card completing the top ten. That's in terms of the points I handed out, which reward higher-tier votes. In terms of pure 'how many people voted at all' scores, the top ten were Tolkien, Martin, Mieville, Wolfe, Bakker, Herbert, Abercrombie, Kay, Gaiman and Hobb.

To answer how many votes were needed: well, it's a lot more complicated than that (both because it's not just a highest-score-wins system, because I take into accounts votes for other books by the same author, and also because I gave more 'points' to top-tier votes than to bottom-tier votes). In theory, if all the conditions were right, a book only needed two people to vote for it in their lowest tier - and indeed there is one (and iirc only one) work here that only got those two votes. In the case of that work (no, I won't name it), the author got enough votes to get a slot on the list, but the votes were split between multiple works, plus the most popular work was after 2000 (but didn't get enough votes to get mentioned there), so the slot went to a less popular work instead. But that's a very odd situation, and most got a lot more than that. In general, a good rule of thumb would be having at least five people vote the book in the 5-12 tier. And I know that five people doesn't sound very many, but bear in mind that a) there were over 600 nominated books and only about 100 voters, so lots of things had only one or two votes for them, and B) the top books totally dominated, which left fewer votes available for the rest to fight for.

I'll talk more about how the list was worked out at another time.

----

Isis: thanks, don't know how that happened.

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Good stuff Wastrel. Some surprises for me - I thought I'd see the Engineer Trilogy by Parker and Altered Carbon by Morgan, instead of the Fencer Trilogy and Black Man respectively.

I plan to use this as a bit of a reading guide. Should last me a while. Out of 111 works listed I have read 14 and have a further 13 sitting on my shelf.

I gots some reading to do.

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Or Meivilles The Scar!

The Engineer trilogy is post-2000, and although it got more votes than the Fencer trilogy, it didn't reach the (higher) threshold for the shorter list.

The Scar is post-2000, and does indeed appear on the post-2000 list. It did beat PSS, but only by one point.

Black Man beat Altered Carbon fairly - although, had I chosen to include the Takeshi Kovacs books as a series, they would together have beaten Black Man.

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The Engineer trilogy is post-2000, and although it got more votes than the Fencer trilogy, it didn't reach the (higher) threshold for the shorter list.

The Scar is post-2000, and does indeed appear on the post-2000 list. It did beat PSS, but only by one point.

Ah, that makes sense wrt KJ Parker. I find The Scar surprising. I had pegged - erroneously it seems! - as the least well regarded of the Bas Lag books. Interesting information.

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I am amazed that The Road didn't make it into the Top 10 for 21st century books. That book gets a lot of attention on this board, and the people who like it, generally REALLY like it.

So was I. I guess that some people didn't consider it genre? Or not enough had read it.

It was joint eleventh on that list. HOWEVER, it did get more points than the Chiang and the Stover - I promoted them onto the list because they got more people voting for them as 'great'. So a different electoral system might have put McCarthy on the list.

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So was I. I guess that some people didn't consider it genre? Or not enough had read it.
I don't think it's because people don't consider it genre. You may be right in saying that not enough of the people who voted here have read it though.

I really liked The Road but there are simply other books that I have liked better over the years and which are dearer to my heart. If I had a top 100/top 50 books list I'm sure it would be in there somewhere. Just because I didn't include it in my own top 20 doesn't mean that I don't rate the book highly.

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I don't think it's because people don't consider it genre. You may be right in saying that not enough of the people who voted here have read it though.

I really liked The Road but there are simply other books that I have liked better over the years and which are dearer to my heart. If I had a top 100/top 50 books list I'm sure it would be in there somewhere. Just because I didn't include it in my own top 20 doesn't mean that I don't rate the book highly.

I don't think we need to make excuses for individual books. Not enough people voted for The Road, for whatever reason. I was surprised by this, because I had thought the book sufficiently popular to get on such a list. But apparently I was mistaken.

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